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‘who will give you a much needed lift of the heart’.
their lives and livelihoods were constantly overshadowed by social prejudice and systematic discrimination.
She was sad, but more than that she was angry.
I also felt ashamed because my first reaction had been to retreat into the safety of my flat as though I feared her melancholy might be contagious.
‘When all this is over, how do you want the world to be different?’
‘I want to be heard.’
When all this is over I want to live in a different world where I can be heard.
Not only management and authority, power and wealth, but also data and knowledge are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few
To be deprived of a voice means to be deprived of agency over our own lives.
‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you’,
Stories bring us together, untold stories keep us apart.
when you feel alone don’t look within, look out and look beyond for others who feel the same way, for there are always others, and if you can connect with them and with their story, you will be able to see everything in a new light.
And when communication is broken, coexistence, inclusion and social harmony will also be damaged.
the feeling of being systematically unheard will slowly, gradually, seal our ears, and then seal our hearts.
The moment we stop listening to diverse opinions is also when we stop learning. Because the truth is we don’t learn much from sameness and monotony. We usually learn from differences.
In a world that is profoundly complex and challenging, group narcissism has become a compensation for our personal frustrations, flaws and failures.
We are confused – but confusion has now become a way of life.
‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’
We are exhausted by anxiety, consumed with anger, our minds and defences all too often overwhelmed.
‘He is nothing – but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything.’
Feeling systematically unheard, unsupported and unappreciated can make me painfully resentful, and abiding resentment will probably turn me into a reluctant listener.
‘I come from many cities and cultures, plural and diverse, but I am also from the ruins and remnants of these, from the memories and forgettings, from the stories and silences.’
every human being, is complicated – layers upon layers of ideas, feelings, perceptions, recollections, reactions, desires and dreams. By placing us into boxes they are denying us our own truth. By placing others into boxes we are denying them their own truth. And so it goes.
We do not give up on the places we love just because we are physically detached from them.
What you have broken will haunt you.
We inherit our circumstances, we improve them for the next generation.
Angst, it can be argued, resembles fear. But whereas fear tends to revolve around a threat, an opponent or an enemy, angst is far more subtle, diffused, pervasive. It is, in the words of Heidegger, about ‘being-in-the-world as such’.
how rage is the progressive oil that keeps the wheels of fairness turning,
cri de cœur
But I equally doubt whether anger by itself is a guiding force and a good friend in the long run. It is not.
The Grapes of Wrath
‘I am just pain covered with skin.’
Anger in the face of injustice and oppression is not only a dignified human response but often the antithesis of indifference.
Anger is also the emotion with the longest memory.
‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.’
How can we turn our individual and collective anger into a force for good?
When the world is blatantly infuriating we can’t keep repressing our anger.
APATHY – SEEMINGLY TRANQUIL yet probably the most pernicious emotion. Just as the colour white is a combination of all colours, apathy is a combination of many emotions: anxiety, disillusionment, bewilderment, fatigue, resentment … mix them fast, mix them hard and you end up with pervasive paralysis, lack of feeling, numbness.
Discrimination always starts with words.
That is the most dangerous emotion – the lack of emotion.
One of the greatest paradoxes of our times is that hardliners are more passionate, engaged and involved than many moderates.
We live in an age in which there is too much information, less knowledge and even less wisdom. That ratio needs to be reversed. We definitely need less information, more knowledge, and much more wisdom.
Paradoxically, too much information is an obstacle in front of true knowledge.
wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.
social media was like the moon: it had a bright side, full of light and promise, and then, an unexpected dark side.
A dose of pessimism is actually not necessarily a bad thing in itself. It makes the mind more alert, more cognisant of what is happening here, there and everywhere. But too much pessimism weighs the heart down, drains us of energy and motivation. It is emotionally and physically debilitating. Perhaps in an era when everything is in constant flux, in order to be more sane, we need a blend of conscious optimism and creative pessimism.
In the words of Gramsci, ‘the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will’.
Do not be afraid of complexity. Be afraid of people who promise an easy shortcut to simplicity.
choose earnest wisdom over snippets of information, choose empathy over hatred, choose humanism over tribalism,
‘What we call the beginning is often the end … The end is where we start from.’*
